I arrive at Mulhouse station on a TGV from Paris, speeding through green, sparse lands covered by a thick, gray morning mist, scattered with cows. I head towards the Chapel of St. John, my first pitstop of the Biennale Photo directed by Anne Immelé. The interior of the chapel is austere, with tombstone lids and ancient stones. I am captivated by a well that seems the entrance to the underworld, to Agartha. The high ceiling draws the eye to some somewhat faded evangelical paintings. Two installations curated by Sonia Voss overlook the empty interior. One is by Lithuanian artist Andrej Polukord. His self-portraits sit atop long tree trunks, as statues. An artist who makes himself small, a tiny figure hanging from a human fate that seems precarious, almost insignificant, stretched towards an ideal infinity, surrounded by what came before and what may follow: trees, biome, sky, organic matter. Certainly an anthropocentric perspective but pretty aware of the surrounding universe. His photographs are mounted on pieces of polished tree trunks, like a wooden base supporting the prints. The whole figure transforms into something else, taking on a totemic appearance.
© Installation view "Monuments et Immortelles" by Andrej Polukord, Chapel Saint Jean, Mulhouse 2024. Credits: Steve Bisson
© Andrej Polukord at Chapel Saint Jean, Mulhouse 2024. Credits: Steve Bisson
© Installation view "Monuments et Immortelles" by Andrej Polukord, Chapel Saint Jean, Mulhouse 2024. Credits: Nigel Baldacchino
In front of them, across from the altar that hosts the crucifixes of the Lithuanian artist, we see the work of the French artist Léa Habourdin. A thin linen veil floats in the light breeze coming in from the side entrance. A shroud imprinted with the natural tones of a large dune. A reminiscent work by the artist, inspired by the Desbiey brothers' efforts to stabilize dunes. It speaks to the will to control the forces of nature, but at the same time, to the very nature of photography, which fixes the image of the world, freezes time, and produces memory. And isn't this the age-old human temptation—to capture nature in a thousand ways, from formaldehyde to herbariums to photographic plates, in print or otherwise? This concept of fixing images in memory awakens in me thoughts of Antonio Damasio and how the conquest of the world and its secularization is nothing more than a continuous projection of patterns and mental constructions.
© Installation view "Monuments et Immortelles" by Léa Habourdin, Chapel Saint Jean, Mulhouse 2024. Credits: Nigel Baldacchino
© Installation view "Monuments et Immortelles" by Léa Habourdin, Chapel Saint Jean, Mulhouse 2024. Credits: Nigel Baldacchino
Outside the chapel, sitting off to the side on the fence, are Tito Gonzalez-Garcia (Ritual Inhabitual) and Sergio Valenzuela Escobedo. They are Chilean. I have a soft spot for that country, so I strike up a conversation. They’re here for the closing event of their exhibition at La Filature, the national theater of Mulhouse. It’s less than half an hour away, and I tell them I’d love to see it. On our way there, we end up talking about Mapuche protests, and the new generations who are unafraid to speak the language of their ancestors. Perhaps something is changing in the collective Chilean imagination regarding the Mapuche. I mention that I will be exhibitin in two weeks the Argentine photographer and activist Pablo Ernesto Piovano, who documented the Mapuche protests from 2018 to 2024. Tito tells me that Pablo was the only non-Indigenous person allowed to photograph the funeral of Camilo Catrillanca, a young Mapuche leader who was shot and killed by the Carabineros while driving a tractor in his community.
Tito Gonzalez-Garcia and Sergio Valenzuela Escobedo, Mulhouse 2024. Credits: Steve Bisson
The exhibition opens, and Tito guides me through the phenomenal installations. I’m in a Mexican village, among humble people, natives who long for a dignified life and are fed up with drug traffickers and their destructive greed. "Oro Verde (Green Gold)" is the title of the exhibition. The gold is avocado, which sells better than marijuana, and Mexico was one of the first to notice. So did the drug trade. This is how the process begins: first, they offer you protection, and eventually, they take control of your land, forcing you into monoculture and exploitative labor. It reminds me of Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, when they started planting eucalyptus trees everywhere, depleting biodiversity to boost hellish productivity. Trees that, when grown in excess, dry out the land as well as perspectives, and kill other plants, including the sacred ones used by Mapuche shamans to glimpse the destiny of the people, heal their uncertainties, and maintain the belief that life is one, and we are part of it.
© Installation view "Oro Verde" by Ritual Inhabitual, La Filature, Mulhouse 2024. Credits: Steve Bisson
© Installation view "Oro Verde" by Ritual Inhabitual, La Filature, Mulhouse 2024. Credits: Steve Bisson
© Installation view "Oro Verde" by Ritual Inhabitual, La Filature, Mulhouse 2024. Credits: Steve Bisson
© Installation view "Oro Verde" by Ritual Inhabitual, La Filature, Mulhouse 2024. Credits: Steve Bisson
Back to Mexico: the natives become fed up with avocados and narcos. And a battle begins. They call it a revolution, and the exhibition tells this story. The text describing it on La Filature’s website leaves a glimmer of hope: "Led by the women of the P'urhépecha community in the village of Cherán, they managed to expel drug traffickers, political parties, and municipal law enforcement. Since then, the village’s inhabitants have founded an autonomous community that places environmental protection at the center of their political organization." Tito is more realistic. He says that, yes, it’s true they won the battle, but the drug trade has found another way to attack the Indigenous community. It’s called crystal methamphetamine, and it’s poisoning the P'urhépecha youth from within. I think of how this is like fentanyl in the United States. The war of the future is invisible, makes fewer headlines than trenches, and kills more than bombs.
© Installation view "Oro Verde" by Ritual Inhabitual, La Filature, Mulhouse 2024. Credits: Steve Bisson
With somewhat heavy hearts, we set off on foot toward the Museum of Fine Arts, the epicenter of the Biennale. Along the way, we hop onto the first tram that comes by. A touch of South American fatalism saves us a good fifteen minutes on the journey. They have a train in the early afternoon, and I almost regret that we can’t continue our conversation. We’re convinced of the urgency in what we do—that navigating the ocean of images in this visual technocapitalism requires steering responsible courses. I tell Sergio about the editorial project Formula for an Invisible Disaster (Penisola, 2023) focused on the environmental catastrophe caused by PFAS pollution in Italy, a project I worked on for a long time alongside biologist Federico Bevilacqua. It’s a necessary course, much like the one Mathieu Asselin charts with Sergio, telling the story of Monsanto’s impact and the massive, suicidal use of pesticides. And I remind myself, chance doesn’t exist. So, I bid farewell to my new Chilean friends, certain that our pirate routes will cross again soon.
© Installation view "Oro Verde" by Ritual Inhabitual, La Filature, Mulhouse 2024. Credits: Steve Bisson
At the Musée des beaux-arts, several talks and readings of recently published books are taking place, but first, it’s worth climbing the grand staircase to enjoy the exhibition curated by Anne Immelé, "Those Eyes, These Eyes They Fade" on the second floor. It’s been a couple of years since the previous edition of this group show in Malta. The artists are the same: Nigel Baldacchino, Bénédicte Blondeau, Awoiska Van der Molen, Bernard Plossu, with the addition of Raymond Meeks. To quote Alexander Morant, the works of these artists respond not so much to what photography should do, but to what it can do. And what it can do, I would add, is show us not only visions or possibilities of expression, but also opportunities for perception. In other words, not only can we act through photography, but photography can act through us. These artists share this commonality, and it has to do with seeing—and with our ability to "surrender" to the work, perhaps stripping ourselves of expectations to embrace a new perspective.
© Installation view, "Those Eyes, These Eyes, They Fade" by Bénédicte Blondeau, at Musée des beaux-arts, Mulhouse 2024. Credits Nigel Baldacchino
© Installation view, "Those Eyes, These Eyes, They Fade" by Bénédicte Blondeau, at Musée des beaux-arts, Mulhouse 2024. Credits Nigel Baldacchino
© Installation view, "Those Eyes, These Eyes, They Fade" by Raymond Meeks, at Musée des beaux-arts, Mulhouse 2024. Credits Nigel Baldacchino
© Installation view, "Those Eyes, These Eyes, They Fade" by Raymond Meeks, at Musée des beaux-arts, Mulhouse 2024. Credits Nigel Baldacchino
© Installation view, "Those Eyes, These Eyes, They Fade" by Bernard Plossu, at Musée des beaux-arts, Mulhouse 2024. Credits Nigel Baldacchino
© Installation view, "Those Eyes, These Eyes, They Fade" by Bernard Plossu, at Musée des beaux-arts, Mulhouse 2024. Credits Nigel Baldacchino
This thought leads me to stop on the first floor, to not overlook the permanent painting collection. I wonder what that generation of artists has to offer. I realize that we "contemporaries" often pay little attention to these paintings, passing them by dismissively. Still lifes, nostalgic landscapes, portraits and wigs, dull mythologies, and dead iconographies. Yet, I can’t help but admire a scene of winter skating painted by Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1613) and its colorful choreography. It reminds me of a piece by Philipp Blom on the relationship between the Little Ice Age of the 18th century and the rise of secular capitalism. I wonder what questions and conclusions the inhabitants of tomorrow will draw from the "photo-oceanic" abysses of today.
Pieter Bruegel The Younger, Scene with ice skating, Oil on canvas, 1613.
I descend to the ground floor just in time to hear Raymond Meeks. I still have fresh in my mind his visual crumbs from the desert—images that seem crafted to scratch the viewer's retina and disintegrate any untouched memory of the world. It's as if all that remains of the illusion of possessing the world are indecipherable fragments. His photographs invite us to gather the dust from the ground to mold a different remembrance. These images are arranged both in the book and on the wall like a lullaby, a visual loop that keeps you in check until you abandon all hope, all claims on the subject. We are at the limits of what can be said. The desert is, after all, a disinfectant that returns us to a more native gaze. I am reminded of Stefano Parrini's fifteen years of wandering among deserts, where the gaze crashes into nothingness. What is eternity if not embracing the nothingness of this existence? After Raymond Meeks's talk comes the pine forest of Nigel Baldacchino, the Pinetu. I know it well because we have walked through its shadowy paths of memory together—those that time often erases, especially if uncomfortable, like heroin and prostitution, malaise in general—but which photography can attempt to hold onto, to render immortal. In his dummy, as in the exhibition, his gaze fluctuates, as if on a boat with a broken rudder. We are lulled by uncertainty. Paper is a veil that we can penetrate, like backlit leaves illuminated by nourishing sunlight. The invitation is clear: it is an abandonment of the surface to invade the space. Baldacchino's thought is a soundscape, sculpted by the wind of memories—organic like the asymptote traced by a curved branch of a pine tree that kisses the ground, conceding to infinity. Baldacchino draws spaces and transforms them. It's up to us to inhabit them.
© Nigel Baldacchino, Mulhouse 2024. Credits: Steve Bisson
© Installation view, "Those Eyes, These Eyes, They Fade" by Nigel Baldacchino, at Musée des beaux-arts, Mulhouse 2024. Credits Nigel Baldacchino
© Installation view, "Those Eyes, These Eyes, They Fade" by Nigel Baldacchino, at Musée des beaux-arts, Mulhouse 2024. Credits Nigel Baldacchino
© Installation view, "Those Eyes, These Eyes, They Fade" by Nigel Baldacchino, at Musée des beaux-arts, Mulhouse 2024. Credits Nigel Baldacchino
The spirit of preservation binds us to places; therefore, we see ourselves in them, building our references and tattooing our emotions. Beyond good and evil, what should we retain from the past of places? What should we save from real estate surgery? What scars? Who judges the landscape? What remains of us? What is the sense of belonging: a breath of wind that caresses the illusion of the present, or a sea current that pushes and holds us together in a shared destiny? These questions sit among my thoughts. I discuss it with Awoiska van der Molen and Raymond Meeks over dinner. I share my interest in language as a repository of memory, as a time machine to access the past, to different ways of understanding the present, and to words that have survived the entropic frenzy of the universe. I return to the Mapuche, the people of the land, wondering if their words embody different ways of understanding nature, just as Awoiska's photographs do. If today’s language is made of images, then tomorrow we will dig into the world through its digital layers and sediments, trying to interpret the semantics and the state of health of society.
© Installation view, "Those Eyes, These Eyes, They Fade" by Awoiska van der Molen, at Musée des beaux-arts, Mulhouse 2024. Credits Nigel Baldacchino
© Detail, installation view, "Those Eyes, These Eyes, They Fade" by Awoiska van der Molen, at Musée des beaux-arts, Mulhouse 2024. Credits Nigel Baldacchino
© Installation view, "Those Eyes, These Eyes, They Fade" by Awoiska van der Molen, at Musée des beaux-arts, Mulhouse 2024. Credits Nigel Baldacchino
On Sunday morning, my friend, publisher, and photographer Tiago Casanova and I head to the heart of Mulhouse, to the concrete tower that offers a panoramic view embracing the town and the distant mountains, along with that human curse of always pushing one’s gaze further. This is the Tower of Europe, named so because the gospel of the bell towers in the Old Continent, after the scourge of the great wars, unfolds in the trenches of the unified market, vying for dominance. It boils down to that macho competition to see who can build it higher—from the "Pirellone" in Milan (1960) to the Mulhouse Tower (1973). We stop to observe the results of the latest call coordinated by Bénédicte Blondeau, dedicated to exploring the possibilities of photography. It’s a project that is also editorial, and I pause to browse through the catalogs on display—precious collections of thoughts filtered through images. I realize that today’s photographer is yesterday’s navigator. Venturing into the exploration of unknown lands means navigating through the multitude of readings and meanings hidden within the scopophilic bulimia of contemporary life, which is increasingly simultaneous. I am surprised to find several authors I admire on the walls.
© View from KunsTURM, Tower Europe, Mulhouse
© Bénédicte Blondeau, KunsTURM, Mulhouse 2024. Credits: Steve Bisson
© Installation view Mauro Corti, (Im)possible Worlds, BPM x PEP, KunsTURM, Tower Europe, Mulhouse 2024. Credits: Steve Bisson
On a higher level of the tower is the installation "Big Fish" by Laurence Kubski—a documentary that reveals the boundaries of ornamental fish exploitation. The data is mind-boggling. The lightboxes are relentless yet marvelous; they are like windows into colorful aquariums that host a grotesque and cruel representation of human supremacy over living forms.
© Installation view, "Big Fish" by Laurence Kubski, at Tower Europe, Mulhouse 2024. Credits: Steve Bisson
This brings me back to the curatorial work done in the appendix of Thann, "En-plein nature," as I wrote a few months ago to introduce the installations of Terri Weifenbach and Vanessa Cowling, which opened the dance of this biennial, inviting us to adopt a phytocentric perspective. I feel tired, as if I’ve been in the sun too long. I have seen and felt so much—exposed to the reflected light of simultaneity. It’s time to board the train and close my eyes.
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